A phone can show one or two panels at a time, at best. There’s a lot of stuff you just can’t do. It’s a tiny, limited canvas, even before it gets shitted up with ads and pop ups.
He later adapted that talk for his "understanding comics" Ted talk. Worth a watch if you love the medium
It's pretty cool on a decent-sized screen, it was designed around the size of the iPad I'd just gotten when I started it. Not so cool on a phone. Try it on both and you'll see what I mean.
Works best on the phone where you can have it fullscreen and smooth scrolling.
I don't enjoy fiddling with the scroll position, or things peeking in from the edges, I like a nicely laid out scene and a button or other control that takes me to the next "page" or scene without the fuss that scrolling to the right position adds.
I don't think any book could give the feeling of transitions as the webtoon format can, yes, its only a panel (or less!) at a time, but the artist can give a halting thought-by-thought feel of a man on his deathbed, or roll out an entire red carpet of flourishes to introduce a character of nobility
You can't go super transition-heavy in print, because well, printing and pages cost. and people need to move their big hands to flick the pages, there is an expected consumption rate for that effort put in, so even if cost wasn't an issue, people would get fed up with the transitions anyhow.
so yeah, 1 panel at a time, is a bit of a downside, but IMO its also an upside in that one can give each panel its own treatment and such. an infinite vertical strip as one's canvas
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of course, getting all the bits into the right places with the right breathing rooms and the right flow is a true skill in of itself, but, I dunno, is it better to read 1 super good comic, or 100 entertaining enough ones? the bar is lowered by all of this, yes, but is that a bad thing?
That being said, I /do/ like the transition thing you mentioned.
Playing "Papers Please" on a phone requires a good memory. Do you remember what the recognized visa issuing cities for Kolechia are? You need to know that. If you have to swipe to the rulebook to look it up, your productivity will drop and you won't make enough money for the day to keep your family fed.
This isn't just in my community, it's noticeable enough in my travels that it seems to be a trend. I assume it is because of more short-format digestible content, along with the shift of social being one-to-one and one-to-many, to being many-to-many, in the sense that you're not necessarily seeking out those you had a direct relationship with, you're seeking out elements and segments of a topical zeitgeist, whether that be tech videos, memes, cat compilations etc.
I also have another hypothesis- when phones that provided a rich experience first debuted, it was the nerds and city folk who got it first. iPhone then brought this mobile-first-lifestyle to the stylemakers and artists and those whose inner monologue is narrated by Justin Long, folks who'd likely have bought anything apple anyway. From there, smartphones and rich experiences were disseminated into the lesser elements of the greater public who either are receptive to tastemaker's influences or have limited option to refute the convenience of popularity; popular hardware is cheap, ubiquitous and accessible, some might say in some regards modern smart phones are disposable.
What I'm getting at is this, this stuff is no longer a mystery to this generation. We are now 2 or 3 generations removed from this type of pocket-computer being anything wow-inducing. I think of it sometimes like when I was a youngster, the class of people who traveled via air vs everyone else at ground level. Air travel had a mystique and prestige, this person must be doing something to be enjoying a cigarette and being served a glass of wine however many feet in the air, direct to destination. The same way I might not be in admiration of my neighbors boots for having a good welt, because a good welt is a given, I assume the youngster of today are no longer enamored by the novelty of a mobile phone or pocket-computer. As such, it is no longer a status symbol for most. So what the new iPhone came out and you got one, that's only a valid status symbol for maybe a few weeks, for over 1,000 USD invested in some models.
Youth of today, I don't see them going for a pocket atlas or any such form factor, I see them going for augmented spectacles or lenses. Everything indicates that a new 'moores law' is taking effect around energy storage and thermodynamics - we are no longer optimizing per-core clock speed, we are optimizing core count and the amount of energy that can be stored to later be turned into CPU cycles rather than heat. As soon as the battery technology will allow it, you will see lenses, whether they be spectacles or contacts, that will take in and assimilate your surroundings, your focus, and the imperceptible changes to your heart rate, retinal dilation, and ocular pressure responses to commercial items. It's not far fetched, we already know of this research being done. Despite the cumbersome experience of VR, we are seeing a point where it is no longer 3D TV or bluray level tech, it's sub-standard as a whole but more and more people are buying it because it shows promise.
I see in the future that our interface devices, whether they be communicators like phones, or additive interfaces like AR spectacles that can dole out retail info in response to a brief biomarker-spike like pupil dilation when glancing at a new pair of shoes. These devices will be funded by corporations much the same way tech learning materials, operating systems, and software is today. It makes most sense that before wider adoption, they'd first be available to those with the most capacity for realizing an ad-prompt via converting to a purchase, so think of like snapchat goggles release, but at your local best buy.
pocket-held mobile phones are the least optimal form factor for every purpose or task it can accommodate other than "fits in pocket". Mark my words, as soon as it can be bonded to a wearable lens, it will be, and the corporations will subsidize it heavily. You think adtech is bad now, just wait.
Much value creation is already digital. If you’re reading this, you’re probably an information worker. You may not have thought about it this way, but the majority of your waking hours are probably spent in front of one screen or another a laptop for work, a phone on the go, a tablet for reading, and so on. So, most of your life is already spent in the Matrix, in a sense, even before the advent of widespread AR/VR. Short of a pullback to an Amish or Andaman Islander existence, most of your life is and will be digitally influenced in some form. Moreover, much of the value in the physical world comes from blueprints created on a computer in some form; eg, the iPhones manufactured in Shenzhen gain much of their value from the designers in California. So, a good fraction of value creation is largely digital.
Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State: How To Start a New Country (p. 279). Kindle Edition.
No social network. If there’s no social network, you have no digital profiles, no messaging, no community fora, no mass media, and no easy way to recruit from the internet. You’d essentially be living an Amish life, relying on pieces of paper or offline cues to determine who was part of your new state and how they interacted. This isn’t going to succeed the nation state.
Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State: How To Start a New Country (p. 371). Kindle Edition.
The average young adult likes to use their phone one handed…
They're kidding, right? Nobody in their right mind actually believes that, do they?
Look at devices with foldable screens and external keyboards like the Asus Zenbook 17. Without getting lost in arguing semantics of if an iPad (mini/pro/regular) sized tablet counts as a mobile telephone, it's clearly not a desktop, and it's easy enough to imagine that desktop computers will go the way of the mainframe.
Agreed. Honestly if I had a way to comfortably write software on my phone I don't think I'd ever use my laptop ever again. Phones are simply too comfortable.
Unfortunately the vast majority of them are consumer devices: unlike real computers they don't come with the tools used to program them. I can't make a new app on my phone and run it.
To your general question, I've heard a professor lament a student stating that all CAD applications should work on phones.
And why is that such a lamentable idea? Modern phones have the processing power these days. Walking around a factory, building sites or a muddy field with a phone in your hand is a lot easier than walking around with a laptop. Plus modern phones have LiDAR and multiple cameras opening up for all kinds of interesting options. Frankly any CAD platform which doesn’t embrace mobile will probably fall out of favour over the next few years.